Kevin Rose on the Digg Revolution

Is Digg the Boston Tea Party of the media?

I think that Digg is very much—it’s a living and breathing thing that is impossible to kind of wrap your head around. And you never know what’s going to happen on the site. I think that’s one of the things that bring a lot of people back to the site. Like I think that when you take a look at— when I wake up in the morning it’s the same feeing in my gut that I had 3 ½ years ago, and that’s what the hell’s in the front page like I have no idea. And it’s that freaky kind of you never know what you’re going to get. And as always it tends to be interesting and kind of gems that you wouldn’t find anywhere else. I think that’s what’s unique and what keeps people coming back.

Is it important for Digg users to interact offline?

Absolutely, to bring people together and get them talking in outside of the online community is a big deal and it’s something that we would like to continue to do. It’s important for the company. It’s important to get users some face time with you so they can give you and each other ideas, their feedback. It’s so much better than just an email coming in, not only that but I think it’s important as we come to evolve our side as well.

One of the things that we’ll be launching in the future is our story suggest feature and we call our recommendation engine, and it’s a piece of software that analyzes all the things that are happening in real time across the site. And it compares you to other users so you maybe Digg number 3000 on the story but who are those other 2999 people? And what else would they find in that you might also find interesting. So when we start to do these things we can serve the stories very early on before they become popular that we can kind of our own heads, hopefully predict that they will become very popular stories, it’s kind of this weird games just kind of we call it.

But it seems we call them like press users, like users that can predict the future, the taste makers and news and it’s really interesting because as we start to surface these stories, we also are finding light minded individuals. And so in the future on Digg, not only when we will say okay, we realized even digging stories about long T and the R8’s so here’s some awesome stories that you might find interesting but you know here’s ten other users that you’re constantly agreeing with, that you had no idea you’re are agreeing with.

And so we’re going to start making those introductions, and once we do that, I mean, we won’t have meet ups and get together as the things when people can come out and said like hey, you know I really enjoy that story that you submitted and like make those connections as real world connections, so it’s pretty cool and it’s fun and hopefully we’ll have that featured out in a few months.

Is this the death of the newspapers?

When it comes down to is the quality of content that’s running the articles. I think that if Digg has done anything, it’s really level the playing field for traditional media so a story can come from New York Times or from somebody’s blog that they running at their basement and received the same amount of traffic, which is insane, which is just was impossible a few years ago. I mean to think that there could be a story in the front page of New York Times that doesn’t get much traffic as someone’s blog that makes it from in to Digg.

It’s just is crazy but it’s great because really what it’s doing is it saying, it’s really not about the one destination so much as is about the quality of the article and the story that’s being presented right, and what people would wan to read. So for us, I’ve seen a lot of people in traditional media, writers that have said my blog is now popular enough to where I’m receiving enough ad revenue or I can consider doing this full time.

You know I can leave my nine to five and say this is my blog. This is who I am as a writer and do that. There have been several people in mallet that wrote for business to—left and started his own network blog sites. They are doing quite well and I think it just gets people more options than in the future. But I mean, quality will always prevail and I think that there is going to be a place and need for that and there’s going to be a need for people that do the deep dive when it comes to news, the fact checking, the people they still are going to need to be teams around certain types of stories. And that’s always going to survive.

How do you ensure accuracy?

The deep dive is being the find slightly differently now than it was. I mean when you think about the way that traditional newspapers would do that, they would have a team working on a story that would follow that story throughout his life span right and do the follow-ups and the fact checking and all that. Now all of these users that are editors on Digg and by editors I mean register users that submit stories, they’re the ones that are doing the fact checking. I mean without a doubt, we have stories every single day that are marked and flagged as an inaccurate. There’ll be a story that’s somebody hits the front page and users will have different burry options and that they go and they do the research and they check the different sites and they say okay, this doesn’t add up.

They’ll submit it in the comments. They’ll often times submit a follow-up story and to flag the articles inaccurate and that they’ll say that right at the top of the article. So that happens all the time. But it really comes down to—I don’t think that’s going away. I think it’s slightly evolving when it comes to Digg, but traditional websites I’m sure will still will have that because they need that for their own kind of solid stories and their own personal site, their own branded site. But for us, it’s very much just living and breathing and it happens on Digg were a story will come up and then there will be every battle to that story that comes up a few hours later and then it’s constantly uses this as getting pushed down so it’s just the way that we do it.

If you owned a traditional newspaper, what will you do?

In discussions that we have with traditional media, when they come in and they say okay, often times, we’ll get phone calls and say hey, can you meet with us? We just want to sit sown and have a conversation about where things are headed. And we sit on this and say okay, obviously you guys have just exploded it on the scene now you’re the second and third highest referral of traffic to our site and we just want to know how can we work with you better.

And I think that one of the things Digg won’t do in the future is kind of refine some of these tools for these publisher sites and say okay, what type of information can we give them to really inform their readers and educate them about what the masses are wanting and really shortening kind of the feedback loop. It’s really about the message that they’re getting from the readers in real time as opposed to printing something and just hoping people are going to like it. And those are tools that we’re working on it and stuff that we’ll have out in the future, cant really say or ten more about that but it’s a good stuff.